Jóhann Jóhannsson with American Contemporary Music Ensemble West Coast Tour: Apr 17 - Apr 20 | Reykjavík Festival at The Los Angeles Philharmonic: Apr 1 - Jun 4

This month the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Reykjavík Festival initiates Jóhann Jóhannsson's return to the west coast with a series of dates alongside the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. Following on his appearance in the two month festival dedicated to the contemporary sounds of Iceland the electro-acoustic composer and chamber symphony will have two nights at the Regency Ballroom and Seattle's Benaroya Hall. This will be the first return of the Icelandic composer since his notable Decibel Festival hosted performance of 2010 at the Triple Door, wherein he performed selections from his "In the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees". As a student of formal music training from age eleven, Jóhann Jóhannsson studied piano and trombone in his native Reykjavík. He abandoned traditional musical training while at high school, frustrated by the constraints imposed on music as an academic subject. Pursuing literature and language at the university, he spent a decade exploring nontraditional music writing with fledgling underground rock bands. These took the form of composed feedback-drenched pieces for electric guitar and ambient layered soundscapes. The years of exploration led to working with digital processing and the manipulation of the resonances of acoustic and electric instruments into striking electronic sound fields. His first recordings to be born of this process appeared on Jon Wozencroft's influential Touch label in 2002 with the release of "Englabörn". This was soon followed by the critically hailed "Virðulegu Forsetar" scored for brass ensemble, massed electronic drone and percussion in 2004.

The content of these first recordings reveal influences spanning such diverse points of origin as Henry Purcell, the "ambient furnishings" of Erik Satie, Bernard Herrmann's charged cinematic scores, Iannis Xenakis' visceral tape and computer music and the New York outsider artist Moondog. Folded into their form was an electronic vocabulary that equally referenced the early explorations of IRCAM, as well as the millennial digital music issued at the time by labels such as Mille Plateaux and Mego. Orchestral and soundtrack albums were to follow, including a 2010 collaboration with American experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison on "The Miner's Hymns". This lyrical and reflective response to Britain’s lost industrial past, and it's accompanying soundtrack, was conceived as a live audiovisual event which saw both UK and New York performances. Scores for cinema, film and theater continue to occupy a larger part of the composer's recent body of work. Particularly the string of award winning collaborations soundtracking the work of French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. The most recent of these released through the historic Deutsche Grammofon label. Including 2016's "Orphée" and Jóhannsson's lending of further sensory tangibility to the dazzling science fiction relativistic, linguistic mystery of "Arrival". Collider's interview on the film and his forthcoming collaboration with the director while "Preparing to Score ‘Blade Runner 2049'" detail his work utilizing the exquisite intonations of Theater of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier. Beyond the soundtrack, the commodious auditory environment of it's two hour duration also featuring excerpts from Max Richter's 2004 electro-acoustic album, "The Blue Notebooks", alongside the exceptional audio design work of film's sound department under Claude La Haye and Bernard Gariépy Strobl. The Quietus discusses "A Kind Of Visceral Quality: Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Favourite Records", which like the score, epitomize a philosophy of minimal gestures with maximum impact, illustrated further in interview for FACT Mag's, "Jóhann Jóhannsson on 'Orphée' and His Biggest Challenge Yet".

Makoto Shinkai's new film "Your Name" at SIFF Cinema: Apr 7 - 20 | Anime Movie Festival at Seattle Cinerama: Apr 25 - May 3

Nearly two decades have elapsed since the Japanese cinema explosion of the 1990s. The directors who led this wave; Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Naomi Kawase, and Takashi Miike, are still among the industry's most high profile faces on the international festival circuit. As recently as the past two years, a new generation of filmmakers from Japan are starting to make themselves heard. This year saw the release of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 5-hour domestic tranquility stunner, "Happy Hour", Koji Fukada taking home the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes for “Harmonium”, and the rising indie animation figure, Makoto Shinkai obliterating the box-office competition with “Your Name". The movie going on to become the second largest grossing film in all of domestic Japanese cinema and internationally, the highest grossing anime ever released. All the while it's young director doubling over in humility in the face of its global success. North American audiences have had to wait the longest of its prospective markets, with the domestic distributor Funimation rolling out the film this month to theaters across the country. While the general construct (two teens exchange genders in their dreams and fall into one another's bodies in their waking lives), might lend itself to juvenile humor and ships passing-in-the-night cliches, over the course of the film's third chapter, this megahit animation discloses the true scale of its outsized ambition. In symmetry, the dramatic scope and sweep of its dazzling images escalates accordingly. The overriding concerns of "Your Name" are revealed to be a weighty mix of youthful pondering of mortality, the passing of time, irrevocable change and lastly, a stunning, apocalyptic awe. As Rich Motoko observes in his, "The Anime Master of Missed Connections Makes Strong Contact in Japan", although hit status is new for Makoto Shinkai, the structural construct and dominant themes of his newest film are not.

Since his first feature length film, "Voices of a Distant Star", (which Motoko points out was created exclusively by the director, with the assistance of friends on a personal computer), Shinkai has explored the loss of connection between adolescents of both the present and future. Digital communiques disappear, calls don't go through, characters narrowly miss meeting on trains, timelines, hopes and plans made, fail to materialize. “Shinkai is a master at depicting and investigating the distance between people,” Jonathan Clements, the author of “Anime: A History” writes. He added, “He excels at allegorizing the way that human beings are separated by gulfs of yearning.” It is into exactly this expanse that Shinkai has projected his mix of modernity and tradition, one that to western minds, expresses itself in a quintessentially Japanese fashion. Kumihimo, the folk art of braiding colored silk is put to elegant service to depict the flow of time itself. A metaphor of the "gathering of threads" that came to the director in his reading on Superstring theory. The film's initial chapters watch as a charming and gently comic playing with what it means for an adolescent boy and girl to trade bodies. Depicted through a light toying with gender, "Makoto Shinkai Takes Adolescent Identity Crises to Extremes". While this may be a device de riguer in much of teen-focused anime, as Manohla Dargis' review makes clear, Shinkai soon complicates the story in a succession of other ways. What at first seem like contextual details (a Shinto temple, a shattered comet filling the night's sky, the chronology which the film's two protagonists occupy), these elements gradually shift, with increasing volition, from background to foreground. Mirroring the reversal of perspective and tone, the meaning of these two intersecting lives deepens, as consequence exerts itself and irreparable change to their world advances. In the assertion of these forces within the film, Makoto Shinkai, Studio Ghibli veteran Masashi Ando, and character designer Masayoshi Tanaka, execute a towering, soaring, heartbreaking reversal quite unlike anything seen in all of anime.

Stepping up to fill the void left in the wake of Cinerama's now extinct(?) Sci-Fi Film Festival Paul Allen's state of the art theater with its Cinerama-Scope screen, Dolby Atmos sound and laser projection system, will host a 23 film overview of the last three decades of best that Japanese animation has to offer. Central to the Cinerama's Anime Movie Festival are the works of Takahata, Miyazaki, Tokuma, Suzuki and and the renowned animation house they founded, Studio Ghibli. While currently on a hiatus, involving a possibly permanent break from directorial efforts from Miyazaki, the British Film Institute addressed the legacy of this groundbreaking studio and it's visionary founders in their June 2014 Sight & Sound feature. Over the course of the issue's many-page sections, critics for the British Film Institute detail the studio's creation of a animation storytelling form of often astounding beauty and richness, their later global success, and the most recent news of their struggle to find a modern-day successor to the studio's iconic director, Hayao Miyazaki. Indicative of this impasse in 2015, "Studio Ghibli Announced a Break in Production", while they reassessed their current financial state, creative objectives and possible new directions for the studio. The Sight & Sound feature positing where the future of new non-commercial animation in Japan may arise, with Suzuki himself offering outspoken support for the Evangelion director and Khara maven, "Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Points to Hideaki Anno". With the global success of "Your Name", it's director has quickly ascended to the shortlist, with pieces like The Guardian's "Makoto Shinkai: Could the Anime Director be Cinema's New Miyazaki?" becoming increasingly common. Yet Ghibli are not inactive. While they have not issued directorial work of their own, the studio has offered financial production and technical assistance to two notable endeavors of last year. The first of them, Michael Dudok de Wit's ""Looking West for an ‘Eastern’ Approach" found in his award winning and dialog-less "The Red Turtle". The second, a more audacious endeavor, and first for the studio, "Ronia the Robber’s Daughter" has made for intrepid viewing in the currently climate of children's entertainment. Particularly so for its reliance on a more traditionally cinematic approach to editing, slower pacing and lack of merchandising tie-ins, "Studio Ghibli's first TV Show makes for a Wondrous World of Peril and Magic". While featured dominantly in the Cinerama's Anime Movie Festival lineup, the selections on offer are not limited to Studio Ghibli alone. As the eye to groundbreaking, high quality programming seen in the full schedule of 23 films over the course of the festival's two week duration attests.

"Now It's Dark: The Films of David Lynch" at SIFF Cinema: April 14 - May 14

Recent years have seen touring retrospectives of central figures from the late 20th Century in the New German Cinema movement "Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road", and the Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s, with "Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien". The landscape of American independent cinema of that decade would have an altogether different topography without the work of it's great sculptor of atmosphere, David Lynch. Referred to as "the greatest director of his era" by The Guardian's 2007 panel of critics, topping their 40 artists listed as having defined the last quarter century of cinema. His bold feature length entry of 1977 "Eraserhead" became one of the most influential midnight movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Playing in arthouse and independent cinemas late-night screenings alongside Jodorowsky's "El Topo", Water's "Pink Flamingos", Sharman's "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", and Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". More than a cult and underground phenomena, the film earned him the attention and funding of Mel Brooks and assistant director on "High Anxiety", Jonathan Sanger. Sanger became a champion of the young director, presenting him the working script adaptation from Sir Frederick Treves and Ashley Montagu's  "The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences" and "The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity". Distributed by Paramount and Universal worldwide, while independently funded, "The Elephant Man" would become Lynch's first studio feature film.

Working with an exceptional cast of professionals was also a first, the film's central characters of Joseph Merrick and Frederick Treves, portrayed by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins respectively, remains among both of the actor's most notable roles on film. While Lynch sourced Peter Ivers for the soundtrack for his first feature, and John Morris for his sophomore effort, the director's hands-on approach was already evident in the film's sound design and audible palette colored by it's pervasive atmosphere of ruin. Not limited to his boldly experimental freshman effort, this looming industrial underworld buried beneath the facade of everyday existence remains one of the reoccurring themes throughout the totality of his work. Time Out London spoke with the director on expressing this theme through the period setting of his second feature and personal scouting of the locations and shooting of key scenes in Liverpool Street Station and Butler’s Wharf in Southwark; "I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories. So here is Victorian England, and I don’t know this land, but I know factories, I know this is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so that side of it resonated with me. Then one day I’m standing in East London Hospital. A derelict hospital, but it still had beds in the wards. Thousands of pigeons, broken windows, but long, glorious hallways, fireplaces, all the details. I’m there in the hall looking into a ward and a wind entered me, and I was back in time. I knew it: 100 per cent. Victorian England. And I said: “Now I know it. No one can take it away from me.”

One of the stranger of all the twists in all the director's turns of fate was to come in the wake of "Elephant Man"'s critical success. The most popular film franchise of the 1980s helmed by George Lucas, had turned the spotlight on Lynch for him to direct the third installment in the Star Wars trilogy. He declined, citing Lucas' comprehensive vision of the fictional universe would allow for very little in the way of space to express his own. Soon after, another notable science fiction property would come the director's way in the form of Dino De Laurentiis licensing Frank Herbert's epic, "Dune", in the wake of it becoming available following the now legendary aborted project from Alejandro Jodorowsky. In a 1985 interview with the German periodical Tip Filmjahrbuch, Lynch details De Laurentiis' approaching him with the project and the source of his personal conceptualization of Herbert's universe; "This is how it happened: I went to Venice, just for an afternoon, to see the Piazza San Marco. Dino De Laurentiis bought me a book, which inspired all these things... A book about Venice. It inspired the idea, that in the world of "Dune" a Renaissance had taken place thousands of years ago, and this renaissance had been very powerful and far-reaching. And people built beautiful machines; they were so well-constructed, that they remained intact until now, the time, when the story begins. Of course this melange gives the humans certain mental abilities. But they need machines nonetheless, and these machines were built before discovering the "spice" Melange. This world is not a world of machines, but they are part of it." Final cut for "Dune" was in the hands of Universal Studios rather than its director, and the film remains a subject rarely broached by Lynch to this day.

As part of the contractual details of directing the film for De Laurentiis, Lynch was under obligation with the producer to direct two more films, the first of which was to be a planned sequel. In the wake of the film's poor box office and mixed critical reception this sequel was never developed beyond the stage of its initial script. The other was a more personal work. Developed from ideas that had been gestating as far back as 1973, and a screenplay that had been shopped around by the director since the late 1970s, De Laurentiis then became both its producer and distributor. Where other studios declined the screenplay due to its tarnished depiction of smalltown Amercan life, foreground presentation of violence, and strong sexual content, the Italian independent gave the director free reign within it's budgetary constrains and most importantly, power of final cut. This project would go on to be considered one of the most notable, and influential independent films of the 1980s. Not only a significant film within the independent cinema landscape of the decade, "Blue Velvet" earned David Lynch his first Academy Award nomination, and came to rank significantly within the BBC's 2015 global critical assessment of the 100 Greatest American Films ever made. Next month SIFF Cinema brings the restored print of this defining work in the Lynch canon along with six other features and the 2017 documentary on the artist's life as, "Now It's Dark: The Films of David Lynch". Running non-chronologically the month of April through May, the series begins with what the director endearingly refers to as his own personal "Philadelphia Story". A Philadelphia of perpetual gloaming ambiance, industrial ruin and decay. It's populace scratching out an existence through indecipherable patterns of domestic ritual in "Eraserhead"'s world of musically inclined radiators and innards-disgorging infants.

Lynch's intertwining of the lives of the historic figures of Joseph Merrick and Sir Frederick Treves, is to be screened in a rare print of "The Elephant Man" on 35mm. And the one birthing the other, his twinned projects for De Laurentiis, "Dune" and "Blue Velvet" will be presented in both new 4K digital restorations and on celluloid. The most recent in numerous documentaries on, "David Lynch: The Art Life" examines the artist's singular creative process through the lens of his multifaceted artistic endeavors. With beguiling charm, Lynch's personal (and psychological) philosophy are applied to the process of generating the paintings, sculptures, furniture design and music of this one-of-a-kind American original. SIFF's series concludes with the Los Angeles trilogy of films that have defined the director's recent work bridging the millennial cusp. Employing longer durations and expressly non-linear devices, this trio of works are as boldly experimental as they are traditionally cinematic. A film of halves, "Lost Highway" is a compelling, yet lopsided neo-Noir thriller from the late 1990's utilizing a split-persona structure which Lynch later refined to greater effect on his masterpiece, "Mulholland Drive". This second film stands as a pinnacle of all things that make the work of this American auteur great; an inscrutable mystery, a shifting and ambiguous tonal palette, high tension, visitations from nightmare worlds and subjective intersections between the beyond and the everyday mundane. As if in a dream, the protagonists of the increasingly unstable realitie(s) depicted in these contemporary noir find themselves enticed into realms of ominous portent on their journey to discovery.

Thom Anderson's once difficult to see licensing labyrinth, "Los Angeles Plays Itself" will remain the defining film on film in the City of Dreams. Yet there are few contenders in the way of dramas set within the glitz, grime and glamour of Hollywood that approach the body of Los Angeles as seen in the exploratory surgery of "Inland Empire". In a filmography of nonlinear, nestled, Borgesian structures and metaphysical dreamlike intrusions to the real, Lynch assembled his most expressly matryoshka vessel for "Inland Empire" in its amalgam of his own fictional cursed production and the mythic nature of some of Hollywood's greatest, lost and never-completed films. Lynch's film itself containing a contemporary variation on a Polish folktale in which a boy who, sparking a reflection after passing through a doorway, "caused evil to be born" by his doppelganger entering the world. In it's other facet it also tells of a girl who, wandering through an alleyway behind a marketplace, "discovers a palace". These two threads are woven into the production of the fictional film-within-the-film, titled "On High in Blue Tomorrows", which is revealed to be a remake of the folklore's original cursed vehicle, a German feature titled "47". The multifaceted, multilayered nature of the film as a film about film is possibly best encapsulated by Jim Emerson in his review for RogerEbert.com; "Inland Empire" presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard", Lynch's "Persona" or Lynch's "8 1/2", they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", Bunuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon", and others."

Wire's new album "Silver/Lead" & West Coast Tour: Mar 28 - Apr 8 | 40th Anniversary Celebrations at The Drill Los Angeles: Mar 30 - Apr 2

Genre spawning post-punk innovators, Wire return to the west coast after 2015's Us tour and 2013's The Drill: Seattle. The latter was then the first of their domestic recreations of the The Drill: London festival, with collaborative performances with regional artists which included Earth, Chastity Belt, and Helmet in their amassed Pink Flag Guitar Orchestra. Three days of music capped with a performance of the totality of 1991's, "The Drill". Following on The Drill: Seattle, the festival's next iteration was held as The Drill: Chicago featuring an extended lineup and collaborations with Tim Hecker, Ken Vandermark and Disappears. Drill Fest returns this weekend with the band's 40th Anniversary performances initiating the first of April's west coast dates beginning at The Drill: Los Angeles. Released in short succession following 2016's "Nocturnal Koreans", their 15th and newest album titled, "Silver/Lead" is both a stripped down representation of their core elements as well as an expansion on the sonic path pursued by their most recent iteration. A phase initiated with a new lineup and recordings in 2002 with the release of the "Read & Burn" series. This totality representing Wire's mission to innovate, warp, mutate and play with rock and pop music's parameters. Beginning four decades past, their occupying of the friction-filled space between pop accessibility, punk, and experimentation produced 1977's "Pink Flag" and 1978's "Chairs Missing". It was into this new as-yet named and genreless zone that they spun post-punk and experimental fusions, like that of 1979's "154" and such striking amalgamations of electronic and rock as heard on 1987's "The Ideal Copy". With later efforts capped by the the gorgeously lush orchestrations of "A Bell is a Cup" and the electronic hybrids of the "So and Slow It Grows" EP, with LFO and The Orb. Coming back around to the present day, Wire returned as a rocking trio who's first album proper was 2003's, "Send". All the while producing a substantial body of quality solo works spanning those same decades. Like that of Graham Lewis' mid-1980s venture into synthpop as He Said, and Bruce Gilbert's numerous soundtrack commissions such as the brilliant, "Music for Fruit". The same period also producing Colin Newman's formula-subverting solo forays into songwriting like those heard on the recently reissued "A - Z". As well as collaborative efforts between core Wire members, like the Dada inspired experimental pop-concrete of Dome. Their's is a legacy that's beyond quantification or easy summation in it's influence. It's safe to say there would be no opening of the floodgates of the math/post-rock revolution like we saw in the 1990's without the groundwork laid down the decade before by Newman, Lewis, Gilbert and Gotobed. Perhaps NPR's Barry Walters says it best; "If you hear the occasional imprint of subsequent musicians (My Bloody Valentine's layered buzz, Blur's quaint Britpop, Godspeed You! Black Emperor's monumental drones, Radiohead's electronic rock assemblies), that's because those are among the many bands this one birthed. The 99.9 percent might not yet know it, but it's a Wire world after all."

"Trigger Warnings" and the Coddling of the American Mind | The Atlantic

A series of pieces revolving around the larger consideration on offer in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's "The Coddling of the American Mind" from The Atlantic follow. Here as a point of entry in considering it's premise, let's begin in relation to the growing spectrum of settings in which the "trigger warning" is becoming institutionalized as a practice; in academia, the arts, and public life. The discussion of it's problematic usage in relation to literature being an ideal access point, examined in a trio of pieces from The Atlantic, The Guardian and Jerry A. Coyne's notable piece for The New Republic, “Life Is "Triggering" The Best Literature Should Be, Too”. From which, the following quote elucidates the limitations of this approach to troubling content, not only in as it applies to literature, but in the broader liberal arts and life itself; "In the end, anybody can claim offense or triggering about anything: liberals about conservative politics, pacifists against violence, women against sexism, minorities against bigotry, Jews against anti-Semitism, Muslims against any mention of Israel, creationists against evolution, religionists against atheism, and so on. This ineluctably leads to a bland homogenization of all literature, and a stifling of challenging viewpoints. As someone who’s culturally Jewish, I’ve deliberately read anti-Semitic books like Mein Kampf, watched movies like Triumph of the Will, and read “triggering” material like The Diary of Anne Frank (trigger warning: anti-Semitism). I’ve deliberately visited Auschwitz to see what it was like (immensely disturbing and unforgettable; everyone should go), and I’ve read accounts of its inmates, like Primo Levi’s moving Survival in Auschwitz (see the extract published here). All of that saddened me, deeply upset me, and brought me to tears. But I am glad I did it, for in a way it’s enriched my life. It’s awakened me to not only what “decent people” are capable of under the right circumstances, but also to how humans can, in impossible situations, function and survive (or die) with bravery. Such literature shows us the full panoply of the human psyche, from its heights to its depths - and, after all, isn’t that what Shakespeare and Dostoevsky were about?"

Further perspective on these concurrent forms of embattled intellectualism, and it’s place in American learning institutions can be found from Anthony Van Jones in Frank Bruni's New York Times Sunday Review piece, "The Dangerous Safety of College". "Middlebury isn’t every school, and only a small fraction of Middlebury students were involved. But we’d be foolish not to treat this as a wake-up call, because it’s of a piece with some of the extraordinary demands that students at other campuses have made, and it’s the fruit of a dangerous ideological conformity in too much of higher education. It put me in mind of important remarks that the commentator Van Jones, a prominent Democrat and author of "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems", made just six days beforehand at the University of Chicago, where he upbraided students for insisting on being swaddled in Bubble Wrap." From which Bruni quotes Van Jones; “I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically,” he told them. “I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous,” he added. “I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you.” The above bears troubling relation to the broadening definitions of "trauma" and victimhood, for which Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers a useful framework for understanding, “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology”, as covered in Conor Friedersdorf's "How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm" for The Atlantic.

The New Yorker taking the premise of sensitivity policy and the ongoing trigger warning debate in higher education to it's logical conclusion in Patricia Marx satirical, "The Constitution of the United States, As Edited by the College Sensitivity Committee". For a deeper look into the on-campus movement previously detailed in the pages of the New York Times as it corresponds to the teaching of history and literature, look to Jennifer Medina's "Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm”. In which, "The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge, not embrace. “Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom,” said Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor at the university here, who often uses graphic depictions of torture in her courses about war. “Any student can request some sort of individual accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all approach is totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.” Rebecca Mead delivers some insightful angles as it relates to women on campus, and in the world, where environments conducive to sexism, threat and misogyny are not uncommon, in her New Yorker piece, "Literature and Life". "The trigger warning debate may seem esoteric, but it expresses a larger cultural preoccupation with achieving safety, and a fear of living in its absence. The hope that safety might be found, as in a therapist’s office, in a classroom where literature is being taught is in direct contradiction to one purpose of literature, which is to give expression through art to difficult and discomfiting ideas, and thereby to enlarge the reader’s experience and comprehension. The classroom can never be an entirely safe space, nor, probably, should it be."

Taking an official stance in relation to it's influence in academia and environments of higher learning, by establishing policy directed toward the new freshman body, a vanguard high profile move saw the, "University of Chicago Strike Back Against Campus Political Correctness". Issuing the below statement; “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” John Ellison, dean of students, wrote to members of the class of 2020, who will arrive next month. In their report assembled by the faculty Committee on Freedom of Expression appointed by Dr. Zimmer and headed by Professor Stone the university established the foundation of their stance. In the wake of the committee's report, several other universities, including Princeton, Purdue, Columbia and the University of Wisconsin system, have adopted similar policies or statements, some of which taken almost verbatim from that of the University of Chicago. That year's letter to University of Chicago freshmen specifically cites the report as embodying the university’s point of view. The objectives of it's policy surmised in The Washington Post's "Don’t Ask Us for Trigger Warnings or Safe Spaces, the University of Chicago Tells Freshmen". From which the school's dean, John Ellison, is quoted; "In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. Indeed, fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission."
Painting credit: Antonio da Correggio

Wolfgang Voigt's new GAS album "Narkopop" released April 21

This past year saw the release of the lavish collection of Wolfgang Voigt's now classic Pop Ambient techno obfuscations of German brass music, schlager and early 20th Century composers, known as GAS. Much in the way of Raster-Noton's book of related photography and unreleased material of 2008, "Narkopop", the first new album in 16 years is a tactile, multimedia affair. In accordance with the spirit of Voigt's body of work under the moniker, the triple LP with accompanying artbook and compact disc, continues the aesthetic conception of his abstract forest photography. In these images of a color saturated psychedelic "Magic Mountain", there is to be found a visual affinity to German Romanticism and the forest as a place of dreams and yearning. Wolfgang Voigt, known under a great many pseudonyms throughout the 1990s such as Mike Ink, Studio 1 and his collaborative project with Jörg Burger as Burger/Ink, stood as one of the central forces behind the rise of Cologne minimal techno. No smart part of which was the 1998 founding of the Kompakt label and distribution with fellow collaborators and travelers in the scene, Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape. Running simultaneously with Voigt's various techno and dancefloor oriented projects of the mid 90's he began to experiment with timbrel structures of free-floating string loops sourced from classical records as a new ambient project. These disembodied tracks, their lack of beginning and end, their intoxicating, partly amorphous structure sounded to him like gaseous miasmic clouds and thus, GAS was born. David Stubbs' "Celebrating 20 Years Of Wolfgang Voigt's GAS" for The Quietus details Voigt's sonic journey through the German countryside accompanied by the sound of Schönberg and Kraftwerk: the merging of string symphony, french horn, synthesizer and kick-drum. The legacy of Krautrock's propulsive minimailsm and Kosmische yearning of the late 1970s wave of experimentalism that produced Can, Neu!, Amon Düül II, Cluster and Popol Vuh continued in a new generation of German electric invention with the coming of Detroit Techno and then Acid House in the late 1980s. These components along with the final element that Voigt conceived in his re-imagining of German Romanticism was to be found in early 20th Century Germanic composers, largely sourced from Berg, Mahler, Schönberg, Webern and Wagner. Through the confluence of these stylistic and cultural streams, a new, mysteriously singular G-ermany A-ustria S-witzerland Alpen techno ambiance emerged. One drenched in heavily laden effects, where the composers of the Vienna school met with submerged rhythms and washes of synthesized sound. Much is revealed in the way of inspiration and conceptual intent, with a rare glimpse behind the the opaque curtain of it's technical process, in The Wire's May 2008 cover story and interview with Cologne's minimal architect.

Kangding Ray North American Tour & Lecture to Benefit the ACLU at Mokedo Gallery: March 10 - 18

Next week Kremwerk, Lust Strength and MOTOR host the Seattle date in Kangding Ray's North American tour. Earlier that day, David Letellier will also be presenting a lecture at Mokedo Gallery, with all profits to benefit the ACLU. It's been a inspired arc since the inception of Raster-Noton, Letellier's home label, some 20 years ago. Over the course of the past two decades the label and publisher has defied the accelerated marginalized and fadishness of electronic music's short "half life", all the while transcending reductive genre codifications. On this side of the Atlantic they've made sporadic showcase appearances in major cities across the continent, from San Francisco and Los Angeles, to Mutek Montreal and beyond. Each time the occasion marked by an evolutionary leap present in each artists performance, as well as the larger audio/visual expression of the label's continuance. The second decade of the 21st Century has yielded some of the finest work to be heard from it's roster. The collaborative Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto albums are a high point, as is Carsten Nicolai's ongoing serial solo work, the Xerrox series. It's two most recent installations characterized by the enveloping vocabulary of distortion on "Xerrox Vol.2" and melodic beauty of this year's rapturous "Xerrox Vol.3". A project which when completed, will likely stand as the opus of Nicolai's recorded career. The year was also distinguished by the dou's release of the collaborative soundtrack to Alejandro Iñárritu's award winning film, "The Revenant". Frank Bretschneider's "EXP" was another high water mark for the label, this boundary pushing multi-media set of abstract audiovisual sculptural objects has not seen another peer in his discography. The label's core trio is rounded out by Olaf Bender and his Byetone project, from which 2008's "Death of a Typographer" was an unexpected meeting of energized motoric Krautrock and 80's synth-pop inspired explorations.

Outside of the core ensemble that initiated the imprint, Raster-Noton has enfolded a global body of work. Ranging from Japan's urban experimental dancefloor duo Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro, as NHK to the DeStijl inspired dynamic austerity of Emptyset to the pure datamatic audio-visual sensory environments of Ryoji Ikeda and Vladislav Delay's improvisation and jazz-informed rhythmic wanderings. The parameters of the label's scope have expanded with the inclusion of the humor and retro-futurism of Uwe Schmidt's live sets as Atom TM, most recently seen on the media package, "HD+" and the melodic dream-ambulations of the abstract pop in Dasha Rush's excellent, "Sleepstep" of 2015. Other recent additions to the label's cast include the pointilist digital rhythms and disintegrated melodic textures of David Letellier's Kangding Ray project and the complex theoretical investigations of Grischa Lichtenberger's "LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demeure", the first of his proposed five-part explorations on the subject of isolation and privacy. David Letellier's Kangding Ray project has been one of the most prolific of these new artists expanding the form of Raster's conception. His recent rapid-fire trilogy of albums, "Cory Arcane", "Solens Arc" and the stylisticly divergent "Pentaki Slopes" EP that initiated his current sound. These albums marking a shift toward a more aggressive, dynamic sound comprised of pointilist digital patterns and disintegrated melodic textures that morph into suggestive rave anthems and abrasive club rhythms. The juxtaposition of these contrary elements are refitted into uneven patterns not unlike a sonic deconstructivist architecture, where industrial techno stompers dissolve into granular sound design and filtered synth pads. When it all comes together in a live setting, it's dynamic endless-detouring of the parameters of techno is something to witness.

"Family Circle: The Films of Yasujiro Ozu" at Seattle Art Museum: Mar 23 - May 18

Twelve years have elapsed since Northwest Film Forum's astounding 5 week, 27 film series, Sacred Cinema: The Yasujiro Ozu Retrospective of early 2005. In the ensuing decade span of time there have been notable single screenings of the Japanese master's film, but nothing approaching the selection on offer in Seattle Art Museum's Family Circle: The Films of Yasujiro Ozu. Illustrating the significance of Yasujiro Ozu's body of work, there are few better points of entry than Mark Schilling's "Re-Examining Ozu on Film". 50 years after the director's death, Japan Times hosted this great overview of the director's life, cinema, cultural and social contribution to Japan's post-War image of itself. It's of note that what many consider to be his masterpiece, "Tokyo Story" was Rated #1 in the director's poll and #3 in the critics' poll in the British Film Institute's Greatest Films of All Time feature of 2012. Ozu's stature among directors and lovers of world cinema further reinforced by pieces like Dave Thompson's Best Arthouse Films of All-Time column, Peter Bradshaw's "The Quiet Master" and Ian Buruma's "Yasujiro Ozu: An Artist of the Unhurried World", for The Guardian. Further reading can be found in David Bordwell's essay for Criterion, "Tokyo Story: Compassionate Detachment" and The Guardian's reviews of his final films, all going some way to describe why Ozu's quiet, poetic and personal reflections on Japanese society are regarded as legendary within the canon of world cinema. Another essential element of the filmography explored in Bradshaw's feature on Ozu's longtime lead and on-screen avatar, "The Heart-Wrenching Performance of Setsuko Hara, Ozu's Quiet Muse". On the subject of the western reception of Ozu, and Japanese film in general, the genesis of recognition and appreciation can be largely traced the work of one man and the retrospective of five films curated by critic Donald Richie for the 1963 Berlin Film Festival. Predating this influential moment in film history, Richie was a champion of all things Japanese cinema, as a post-War Japanese citizen, journalist and critic, author of "Ozu: His Life and Films" and reviews like that which he did for Ozu's "Floating Weeds" upon it's release in 1959. Over the decades following there were other high profile culture figures attuned to Ozu's quietly stirring dramas, no surprise then to find Roger Ebert among them, and arthouse institutions who had embraced his work, like those depicted in Richard Combs "The Poetics of Resistance" for Film Comment. No shortage of contemporary analysis, appreciation and criticism on Ozu's filmography exists in the digital age, with a small selection of highlights represented by Senses of Cinema's Great Directors feature on Ozu and the abundance of essays and releases offered on the Criterion Collection.

Noir City Festival: The Big Knockover at SIFF Cinema: Feb 16 - 22

Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation returns to Seattle following this past summer's Noir City 2016: Film Noir from A to B with bold new 35mm prints courtesy of their collaborative efforts with The UCLA Film & Television Archive. The Preservation Society and it's annual touring festival, offering one of the country's most, "Fascinating Windows into Our Cinematic Past". The work of the restorationists at the archive feature prominently in the LA Weekly's discussion of the expansive shift to digital distribution and projection nationwide, "Movie Studios are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital are Vast, and Troubling". Their work will again be on display after the selections from the UCLA Festival of Preservation featured at Northwest Film Forum's annual series of last spring. Next week's Noir City: The Big Knockover - Heists, Holdups and Schemes Gone Awry at SIFF Cinema Egyptian screens both 35mm and new digital restorations comprising ten double bills that present a excursion through that ultimate of thriller; the heist film. Highlights from this year's program include a new restoration of one of the true classic of the genre, in "The Asphalt Jungle" John Huston delivers a complex work of human ambition, resolve and corruption. "The Asphalt Jungle: “A Left-Handed Form of Human Endeavor” remains one of the one of the greats from America's mid-Century exploring the darker underside of urban America, and the lives of those operating in the shadows. Delivering a meticulously crafted set of thrills, turns and heartbreaking failures, "Dark Passage" features an astounding ensemble cast starring, Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Louis Calhern, Anthony Caruso, Brad Dexter, Marc Lawrence and a cameo turn that put Marilyn Monroe on the map. Japanese Noir makes an appearance in the program with Takumi Furukawa's entry in the "borderless action" genre and it's confluence of "Action, Anarchy and Audacity", made popular by his contemporaries at Nikkatsu, Seijun Suzuki and Toshio Masuda. Set in the world of the Yakuza, "Cruel Gun Story" stars the stalwart of the genre, Jô Shishido, as the sharp-witted Togawa enlisted to take on a major heist following the Japan Derby. As is the case with much of the Nikkatsu Noir, things are not what they seem as it soon becomes clear there is more to the heist, and the Yakuza who have enlisted him than Togawa knows. French director Henri Verneuil's star studded French-Italian gangland meetup is as globetrotting in it's locales as is it is twisted and turning in it's plot. Again, a strong ensemble cast of specialists is brought together by Jean Gabin's aged crime boss under the promise of the world's most challenging, and lucrative, heist. Set to the tone of Ennio Morricone's evocative score, French crime stalwart Lino Ventura pursues "The Sicilian Clan" through the thickly plotted intertwining mesh of enterprise, crime, passion and deceit.

Other high points in this year's programing include; Jack Hawkins, Roger Livesey, Richard Attenborough in the zenith of Basil Dearden's filmography, the ensemble cast of adrift post-World War II veterans comprising "The League of Gentlemen". The very British band of gentlemanly rogues literally taking their cues from the script of a throwaway pulp novel. Brits also play a prominent role as Alec Guinness leads a crew of eccentrics, specialists and outsiders in one of his great roles as the head of "The Ladykillers". Make no mistake, this 1955 comedic caper from Alexander Mackendrick is very much the real deal and should not be confused with the less achieved Coen Brothers remake of the 1990s. Back on North American soil, Robert Shaw's cool and collected soldier of fortune hijacks a subway train loaded with passengers in one of the great New York City films of the century. Equally unlikely is the duo of transit cops, Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller, who stand in the way of the high-stakes ransom scheme. Propelled along by meticulous high-speed editing and David Shire's memorable score, "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" could only have taken place in the Manhattan of the 1970's and stands as a testament to the city's thrilling mix of classes, culture, crime and multi-ethnicity.  Lastly comes two representations the true gold standard of the genre from France in the 1950s and 60s. Under the encouragement of fellow director Jean-Pierre Melville, blacklisted American expatriate Jules Dassin adapted a rudimentary crime novel into a setpiece for the one of the utmost bravura break-in sequences found in all of cinema. "Rafifi"'s central heist sequence alone has earned the film it's status as a landmark in suspense. Running some thirty minutes without dialogue or soundtrack score, the film's central scene cunningly employs devices as diverse as ballet slippers and an umbrella, and sparked Dassin's prolific career in Europe. No noir series would be complete without an entry from the French, and "Classe Tous Risques" may be the most quintessentially Francophile crime film of all time. Dogged and on the run, Lino Ventura's aged gangster navigates the multitudinous twists and turns of this Claude Sautet career-highlight, with only one ally in all the world played by the young Jean-Paul Belmondo. The definitive European "one last job" film of the 1960s, it's a one man against the world, as Ventura's Abel Davos goes toe to toe against the crime world he once ruled in this hyperstructured adaptation of a novel by José Giovanni.